The Future of Islam by Esposito John L.;

Author:Esposito, John L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN MUSLIMS

The traditional battle cry for the defense of Islam is “Islam in danger.” Today, some Muslims speak and write of “Islam under siege” or of the rise of creeping Islamophobia or, like Timothy Winter, of the “incipient inquisition” Muslims face today. What are Muslims in the West to do?

Winter lays out a path of acculturation, self-criticism, and reform.

Are we Americans, or Canadians, or Britons, simply by virtue of holding a passport and finding employment? Or is this our emotional home? Traditional Islam has been expert in adoption and adaptation. The new anti-semitism makes not the slightest headway against it. It is also manifestly the case that moderate reformists have produced many American Muslim communities that are sincerely American, and speak frankly against extremism. Yet it needs also to be recognised that a growing number of scriptural-literalist community leaders, particularly those funded by Middle Eastern states where the language of sermons is violently anti-American, are sceptical of the kind of versatility offered by traditional Islam or by the reformers.73

Winter sees the future in terms of the next generation.

It is this new generation that is called upon to demonstrate Islam’s ability to extend its traditional capacities for courteous acculturation to the new context of the West, and to reject the radical Manichean agenda, supported by the extremists on both sides, which presents Muslim minorities as nothing more than resentful, scheming archipelagos of Middle Eastern difference.74

The challenge for European Muslims, as for American Muslims, is, first, a firmly rooted Muslim identity:

Unless American Muslims can locate for themselves, and populate, a spiritual and cultural space which can meaningfully be called American, and develop theological and social tools for identifying and thwarting local extremism, they will be increasingly in the firing line.75

Second, acculturation requires recognizing that the anti-Western writings of popular Islamist writers like Pakistan’s Mawlana Mawdudi and Egypt’s Sayyid Qutb were written in the mid-twentieth century for postcolonial societies in Muslim countries facing repression and corruption, not for Muslim minorities in the West.

Third, an authentic understanding of Islam’s position toward the non-Muslim countries in which Muslim minorities live requires that Muslims de-ideologize recent militant, distorted interpretations of Islam and return to the Islamic tradition. Winter warns:

An insulting guest will not be tolerated indefinitely even by the most courteous of hosts. . . . A measured, concerned critique of social dissolution, unacceptable beliefs, or destructive foreign policies will always be a required component of Muslim discourse, but wild denunciations of Great Satans or global Crusader Conspiracies are, for Muslims here, not only dangerous, but are also discourteous—scarcely a lesser sin. This must be made absolutely clear to organisations who visit communities with a view to offering funding from totalitarian [Muslim] states.76

Fourth, and most important, Winter insists that Islam’s past heritage, the classical Islamic tradition, not Islamic fundamentalism or Islamic modernism, holds the key to the future of Islam and Muslims. The providential success story of Islamic civilization needs to be reappropriated and built on:

Salafist and modernist agendas which present

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